The Archos 20G HDD is avaible at lot of places, newegg.com, amazon.com etc. I bought mine @ compuplus becasue newegg is currently out of stock till next week. Compuplus is cheapest anyway @$151 but you have to pay $14.95 for 2nd day shipping. In the end, it was still worth it because I ordered on Wednesday night and it arrived Friday morning. BTW, no affiliation to any of the above.

I am attching the HDD directly to the USB port of SL6000. Z recognize it right away. The cable I used is something I got from Staples which was discussed in other threads before.

Archos advertised the foot print of the HDD is smaller than a floppy drive. It'snot till I saw it in person that I realized how small it is. Imagine two to three floppy disk stacked on top of each other and it's smaller than that.

I want to test to see if I can watch a Mepg-2 movie from it directly. If it's successful, I don;t have to go through the lengthly process of converting movies to avi again.

MP3 and MPEG-4 avis works directly from the HD. catch: neither Sharp mediaplayer nor Dr Z Video player search for items in /mnt/usbstorage. So I have to go to document tab and click on the files so their default applications will open them.

MP3 sounds no different playingf from SD. I detect a slight slow down on avi payback compared with my 512 SD. Then I tried a 720x480 30fps mpeg-2 and it was really bad as expected. I highly doubt if the processor can play that kind of video even from internal memory. I will need to convert some mpeg-2 to 320x240 @15fps to see it will work.

Just another data point, but I have used SanDisk SD cards (both of Chinese manufacture) of 256 and 512 sizes, in both vfat and ext2 formats, in two different Zaurii without difficulty.

I just got some SanDisk 256MB cards and formatted them for the ext2 filesystem (fdisk type "83" Linux, mkfs /dev/mmcda1) for my two SL6000s as per the instructions on http://docs.zaurus.com/. Everything looked good, but after a while, I started getting flaky messages when I did "ls" on /mnt/card. This happened after I started filling up the filesystem, so I'm guessing the formatting screwed up and made some necessary metadata a writable part of the filesystem, and as I filled it up I started clobbering the metadata. Now nothing seems to work. I tried using my digital camera to reformat to FAT16 format, but it now thinks my 256MB card has 3.6MB.

I'd like to hear some experiences owners have had with the CF host adapter and this USB drive. I'd like to have one of these to install gentoo for zaurus on, instead of running it over NFS like I am doing now.